I was in my 20s and I had shelved my social life and returned to university. I loved my degree but I was drowning — it was a double with more contact hours than felt humanly possible. Between lectures; tutorials; assignments and part-time work, my general fitness had declined. Noticeably. A short sprint to catch a tram would leave me feeling faint.

My diet wasn’t faring well either. I had been a healthy eater but as I got busier, convenience started to trump nutrition. Late at night, after the campus cafes had closed, I would raid the vending machine outside my lab for whatever sustenance I could get.

And I felt so tired.

Something had to change. I needed to get active but I didn’t like the idea of going to a gym. During the semester break my housemate passed me a book she had just read. The Secret Smile, a thriller by Nicci French. We had consumed so many of these indulgent easy-to-read thrillers, little did we know that this one would have a life-changing impact.

In the novel, the protagonist takes up running. She reads a training manual which warns of overtraining and so starts her journey oh so very tentatively. She initially runs a hundred yards. No more. Her level of caution is laughable. The more I considered her approach, however, the better it sounded. I was unfit but damn it, I could run a hundred yards. Hey, I could probably run for a full minute. My housemate Molly thought she could too. So we retrieved whatever ancient trainers we had and prepared for our first run. Just a one-minute run of course.

So, off we went. We sped off and Molly cautioned that we should take it easy, easy enough to maintain our animated conversation. This sounded right. We slowed down. We felt a little awkward but we weren’t, as we feared, overheating and gasping for air. We kept commenting that it wasn’t nearly as horrible as we had anticipated. High praise indeed. And then it was over. We had run for a minute. We could run!

The next day we repeated the experiment. This time for two minutes. Again, we took things very slowly. Again, it wasn’t horrible. And so we continued every night, adding a minute each time. Towards the end of our 7-minute run, we turned to each other in alarm, this one was hard. Then it was over.

At the time, I didn’t know any runners and had no one to compare myself to. All I knew was that I could run continuously for 7 minutes — and this was nothing short of a miracle. Running was the domain of the super-fit. Every one of my achievements, no matter how minuscule it may seem now, filled me with pride. I would love to know what distance and pace those initial fledgeling runs were, but I am glad I didn’t track them at the time. I would hate to think that I may have discovered that I had run slower on day four than on day two and felt subsequently discouraged.

Having had such a positive initiation into running, I despair when I see new runners set themselves up for failure. So many start running with lofty time and distance goals, find them impossible and then give up proclaiming that they just aren’t any good at running. Sometimes they repeat this process again and again over many years, adding a little more self-loathing and waiting a little longer before trying again. It is hard to watch.

In the early days, I wasn’t remotely interested in running long distances. I just wanted to feel a little fitter. I was happy to run 15 minutes a day and thought anything longer was the domain of the fitness-obsessed. The idea that I would one day run marathons, would have horrified me. Had I pushed myself too hard too soon, I doubt I would love running as I do today.